MEETINGS REALLY ARE THE WORST
Online news site Axios caused a stir Sunday by publishing and analyzing three months’ worth of President Donald Trump’s (non-public) daily schedules — the ones that inform the White House staff about Trump’s plans for the day, not the ones released publicly (which you can see at Factbase, which shows a running total of the days the president spent golfing).
Trump critics quickly seized on the fact the president spent 60 percent of his working hours in “unstructured Executive Time.” In some lexicons, that translates into time glued to cable TV news, Twitter app at the ready.
Citing half a dozen anonymous sources, Axios said Trump typically spends the first five hours of his day — 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. — in executive time, but not at the Oval Office. “Instead, he spends his mornings in the residence, watching TV, reading the papers, and responding to what he sees and reads by phoning aides, members of Congress, friends, administration officials and informal advisers,” the site reported.
My hero!
In the interest of full disclosure, I should note I loathe meetings with the sort of intensity one normally reserves for the New England Patriots.
I’m not belittling Axios’ reporting. Persuading a staffer to hand over copies of the president’s private schedule is kind of like persuading a worker at a company preparing for an initial public offering to release the chief executive’s calendar — it’s revealing and could conceivably damage the entire enterprise.
But there are a lot of ways to approach the job of president, and some perfectly good approaches involve a calendar that looks like Trump’s.
Being president, as President George W. Bush famously put it, means being “the decider” — the final link in the chain of policymaking and administration. Out of necessity, presidents operate at a very high elevation. The federal bureaucracy is so enormous, a president has to rely on what amounts to multiple internal CEOs to run the various pieces of it while he or she sets the direction and the overall goals.
We the people want a president who’ll make good decisions, which require good information and good judgment. It does not require a schedule packed with meetings. A president could spend hours in the residence poring over briefing books, or periodically summon top aides to the Oval Office for quick pro/con discussions, or pick up the phone to get the thoughts of a variety of people with the right expertise and perspective.
Trump’s spokespeople argued, correctly, that a virtually empty calendar does not equate to a virtually empty day. “He does many different things here throughout the day” during Executive Time, said Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway; for example, she said, the recent interview he gave The New York Times probably appeared on the calendar just as Executive Time.
And in case you’re wondering, the federal Presidential Records Act doesn’t require Trump to keep detailed records of his calls, meetings and other time-filling activities. It merely requires him to preserve copies of whatever records he keeps.
Admittedly, I’m leaning over backward here to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.
He famously “doesn’t like to read,” as former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson once said, which means he relies on other people’s critical thinking and analysis more than his predecessors did. He’s notoriously impulsive, which means he doesn’t vet his ideas well. And he seems to rely on a coterie of friends and sympathetic figures for feedback, rather than anything that might look like a panel of experts.
Having said all that, I still think it’s a mistake for people who don’t like the president to seize upon his calendars as proof he’s idling his hours away. All we know for sure is he doesn’t like meetings. That’s no black mark in my book.